The Register

Watch this science friction in action Video Researchers claim to have trained an autonomous vehicle to drive as well as an amateur race-car driver, a skill set that could be used to build safer artificially intelligent motorists, in theory.…

Action packed day offers training, networking with over 12,000 people Promo Whether you are still considering a move to the cloud or already a seasoned user, you should find plenty to interest you at the AWS Summit London on Wednesday, 8 May, 2019.…

Big Red makes its case to America's highest court that... there's no case to hear Oracle has filed its formal response to Google's plea in January for the US Supreme Court to review the two tech goliaths' long-running war over Java, Android, APIs, and copyright.…

Tech support outfits settle out of court after allegations of bogus infection symptoms to extract repair charges Office Depot and Support.com have coughed up $35m after they were accused of lying to people that their PCs were infected with malware in order to charge them cleanup fees.…

Oh no, these patches kinda blow, go go Switchzilla! Just as Cisco is looking to close up more than two-dozen security flaws in networking boxes, researchers are claiming a set of previously-issued patches are failing to work properly.…

CTO Vogels on phishing emails: 'There is always an idiot who clicks that link' Amazon devs and users are gathering in Silicon Valley as Amazon Web Services hosts its AWS Santa Clara Summit '19 on Wednesday and the former book vendor used the event to announce a veritable cornucopia of new stuff.…

If claims are true, someone in HR is going to be getting their marching papers... shame IBM is once again facing legal action in America after ditching staffers over the age of 40.…

Dodgy accounting? Not according to KPMG due dil – barrister Autonomy Trial Hewlett Packard crashed Mike Lynch’s thriving Brit software biz Autonomy into the ground after buying it, the former Autonomy CEO’s barrister told the High Court today.…

Assuming you can actually install 19H1, as the test build is yanked from the Slow Ring With the next release of Windows 10 looming, adoption of October's Update of the Damned remains woefully low, according to figures from AdDuplex.…

And it bombarded the British PM with personal phone calls Autonomy Trial HP furiously lobbied key British government ministers in late 2012 as part of a desperate effort to "preserve the credibility" of CEO Meg Whitman after its $8.8bn writedown of Autonomy – including direct phone calls to the then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron, London's High Court learned this morning.…

Analyst revises forecast ... further down Top UK pop-pickers CCS Insight have predicted that smartphone demand will decline 3 per cent this year, the latest in a flurry of gloomy forecasts.…

... but a great storage appliance, which is the point, says CTO Phil Straw Storage startup SoftIron has launched three products designed to make it easier to deploy Ceph – a free software storage platform that supports block, object and file storage.…

10 million IOPS and counting Huawei has been knocked off its position at the top of the SPC-1 storage benchmark rankings by Fujitsu, with a 10 million IOPS+ array blowing away Huawei's 7 million IOPS OceanStor.…

Most of the internet: Yikes Google, keen to join the ranks of megabucks firms aiming to convince punters they take the immoral use of their tech seriously, has launched an ethics advisory council with what it terms "diverse" perspectives.…

Will track parts, vehicles and suck up data from the factory floor Volkswagen has thrown its lot in with Amazon Web Services to float a cloud that will suck up data from the scandal-struck car maker's 122 manufacturing plants and systems to manage the effectiveness of assembly kit.…

CRM biz accused of knowingly helping epic rise of abuse website Backpage Salesforce, self-appointed ethical champion of the US West Coast, is facing down a lawsuit that alleges it was embroiled in the Backpage.com sex-trafficking scandal.…

Security exec bemoans impact of cuts, confirms women in cyber recruitment scheme axed Efforts to lure, evolve and hold on to staff are proving quite troublesome for DXC Technology's Security practice as the beleaguered outsourcing biz continues to wage war on its cost base.…

Flawless applications are for time-rich people with endless cash Opinion With Boeing's 737 Maxes grounded and its MCAS anti-stall software being patched, a high-intensity spotlight has been shone on the issue of software reliability. But putting aside whether Boeing's software is ultimately shown to be a risk factor, for some years now the industry has been sleepwalking into a tacit acceptance of unreliable software.…

Switchzilla touts advanced analytics, automation Promo Protecting your network from a barrage of assaults by brand-new as well as tried-and-tested methods of attack is increasingly challenging.…

Every new phone is a hard sell in 2019. Will photo stunts be enough? Comment In a saturated, stagnating smartphone market, Huawei now spends immense resources on publicity to gain attention – not once but twice a year. Yesterday in Paris saw 3,200 – including The Register – attend the launch of the P30 models, with over 2,000 of us witnessing some impressive imaging pyrotechnics not seen on smartphones before.…

Sales execution, product packaging, non-cloud-centric customers don't help Analysis Ambitious online file-silo boxer Box can't enter the heavyweight enterprise content management (ECM) championships because its core platform is too skinny to cope.…

Physics undergrad tells El Reg how she developed planet-spotting machine-learning code Machine-learning algorithms have been used to uncover two previously unseen exoplanets in the archive of data amassed by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope.…

'We're also racing against our worst enemy' says President Trump's straight man – but who could that be? President Donald Trump wants NASA astronauts to return to the Moon by 2024 “by any means necessary,” Vice President Mike Pence thundered on Tuesday.…

Cellular networks asked nicely to 'fess up or something might, maybe, happen some day The US Federal Trade Commission has asked seven American providers of mobile broadband service to provide details about how they deal with customer and device data.…

Could it be that IBM has spent its money wisely for a change? Before it is subsumed by a sea of big-suited IBM blueness, Red Hat somehow managed to miss its own forecasts while turning in some otherwise sturdy financial numbers on Monday.…

Risk-assessment plan snubs Uncle Sam's fears, will let Euro nations freely decide where to get telecoms gear The European Union says it has a plan for securing its 5G networks – and no, it doesn't necessarily involve forbidding the use of Huawei kit, US-style.…

Confusing rules aim to spread the wealth... in two years' time The internet as we know it will end in two years, following the approval of new online copyright rules by the European Parliament.…

Meanwhile US megacorp tells court that Mike bungled his counterclaim Autonomy Trial Ex-Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch’s counterclaim against HPE, amid their ongoing legal battle over HP's ill-fated $11bn acquisition of Autonomy in 2011, will fail – because it was filed against the wrong legal entity, HPE’s barrister boldly claimed in court this afternoon.…

PC maker emits legit version of its driver, BIOS upgrade util after supply chain hijack Asus has released an update for its software update utility to rid about a million of its notebooks of a spyware-laden software update pushed to victims by its software update system.…

The appliance of cloud science... on-premises Not satisfied doing the hybrid thing with HCI in Azure Stack, Microsoft's ambitions to straddle both the on and off-prem tech world have also seen the Azure Data Box Edge released to general availability.…

Plus: Redmond's shot at image recognition, Custom Vision Microsoft has emitted a couple of technologies for its Azure Cognitive Services designed to spot unusual patterns and classify images.…

A legal boffin also gave us some useless advice, moans Grove Pensions A pension-pushing biz has been fined £40,000 for sending 2 million spam emails in twelve months.…

P30 uncannily similar to 2018's P20 bar imaging overhaul Huawei continues to provide stiff competition to Apple and Samsung with P30, its prime 2019 flagship range launched today.…

Windows Server Software-Defined Datacenter gets evolved, blasted by rebrandogun Microsoft slapped Azure Stack with a Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) moniker today to tempt those not ready to go full cloud.…

From resiliency and security to governance Sponsored webcast In this era of increasingly low-cost compute and ever-expanding volumes of data, enterprises are taking a sudden interest in what was once the rarefied preserve of the IT boffins.…

'Sexit' means... more VPNs, says xHamster veep Just a third of Brit smut-watchers say they will play ball with the government's planned age-check system for online adult content when it finally comes into force.…

Creative accounting may not be actual lies, muses judge Autonomy trial The judge in the Autonomy trial at London's High Court has questioned a key plank of HPE's case against former execs Mike Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, asking whether Autonomy's accounting practices were in fact fraudulent – which is what HPE has alleged.…

Cashflow software biz says it is 'confident' taxman will go easy More than a million businesses have yet to register for the British government's new digital tax programme, with less than a week before the reform kicks in.…

Sales into retail sink 25% during Jan and Feb... just breathe everyone, stay calm Brit consumers might have caught the pre-Brexit jitters in the first two months of this year as the amount of PCs sold to retailers crashed, according to shipment figures compiled by channel number cruncher Context.…

Department for Education slammed over wasting cash The Department for Education forked out £15,000 defending its controversial pupil nationality data slurp that was canned just months later.…

Season 2 of Data Centre Wars starts off a bit samey A 100MW data centre campus in County Wicklow, Ireland, is in danger of being delayed or cancelled altogether after an appeal was lodged with the country's planning authority, An Bord Pleanála.…

Everyone's had enough of their sh!t Column Somewhere between Cambridge Analytica and Christchurch, historians of the future will draw a line and say: "This marked the peak of FAANG*'s influence."…

3PAR boss Ivan Ianaccone is the latest to jump ship The boss of HPE's 3PAR has quit for a cloudier future as head of storage at Amazon Web Services.…

Boss makes staggering admission during conf-call to discuss impact of latest cost purge: $60m to be cut from infosec division Exclusive A senior exec within DXC Technology's global security practice has acknowledged his staff's "puzzlement" at the company's reluctance to fund examinations for infosec certifications.…

Astroboffins find and probe a new planetary wonder Fresh storms rip through Neptune’s skies every four to six years creating a blemish known as the Great Dark Spot – and scientists have clocked another formation of the planetary wonder using the Hubble space telescope.…

Predictive prognosis could boost life, profits Video Machine-learning algorithms can predict the lifetimes of lithium-ion batteries, and could help scientists develop better battery designs more quickly and at a cheaper cost, according to a paper published yesterday in Nature Energy.…

In space, no one can hear you scream... with frustration NASA's first-of-its-kind all-women spacewalk, due to take place this week, has been scrapped - in part due to a lack of spacesuits that fit.…

Meanwhile American Airlines cancels 90 flights a day The Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 that crashed this month, killing all 157 passengers and crew, was actively using Boeing's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that is thought to have brought down a similar 737 five months earlier.…

Apple rolls out repairs for 51 iOS flaws, including nasty ones, plus fixes for macOS In addition to teasing the world with a glimpse of subscriptions services for newspapers and magazines, gaming, and video entertainment, Apple on Monday released iOS 12.2, which patches 51 security vulnerabilities.…

0.4 to 10% of corporate wage slaves could be up for the chop Oracle has laid off about 40 people in its Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) group in Seattle – and on Friday began notifying about 250 workers at its Redwood City facility and about 100 at its Santa Clara location, both in California, that they will be let go in May.…